Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. —Matt. 11:30

He felt like the tragic character Boxer the Horse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, described as the farm’s most dedicated laborer whose answer to every problem, every setback, was “I will work harder”—that is, until he collapsed from overwork and was sent to the knackers’ yard.

“Working longer and harder had been the solution to every problem,” McGinnis said. But all of a sudden, he realized, “The marginal return of working harder was, in fact, negative.”

When you simply can’t try any harder, it’s time to find a different path.

There is an ebb and flow to life. Rhythms are in everything we do. There are times to push hard and times to rest and recuperate. But these days many of us are pushing harder and harder all the time. There is no cadence, only grinding effort.

We live in a time of great opportunity. But there is something about modern life that’s like trying to hike at high altitude. Our brains are foggy. The ground beneath our feet seems unsteady. The air is thin and it can feel surprisingly exhausting to make even an inch of progress.

I’d never been more selective in my life. The problem was, it still felt like too much. And not only that: I felt a call to increase my contribution even while I had run out of space.

Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.

Motivation is not enough because it is a limited resource. To truly make progress on the things that matter, we need a whole new way to work and live. Instead of trying to get better results by pushing ever harder, we can make the most essential activities the easiest ones.

What could happen in your life if the easy but pointless things became harder and the essential things became easier? If the essential projects you’ve been putting off became enjoyable, while the pointless distractions lost their appeal completely? Such a shift would stack the deck in our favor. It would change everything. It does change everything. That’s the value proposition of Effortless.

Perfectionism makes essential projects hard to start, self-doubt makes them hard to finish, and trying to do too much, too fast, makes it hard to sustain momentum.

With residual results you put in the effort once and reap the benefits again and again. Results flow to you while you are sleeping. Results flow to you when you are taking the day off. Residual results can be virtually infinite.

Effortless Action alone produces linear results. But when we apply Effortless Action to high-leverage activities, the return on our effort compounds, like interest on a savings account. This is how we produce residual results.

Under optimal conditions, your brain works at incredible speeds. But just like a supercomputer, your brain does not always perform optimally.

Think about how a computer slows down when its hard drive gets cluttered with files and browsing data. The machine still has incredible computing power, but it’s less available to perform essential functions.

Similarly, when your brain is filled with clutter—like outdated assumptions, negative emotions, and toxic thought patterns—you have less mental energy a...

A concept in cognitive psychology known as perceptual load theory explains why this is the case. Our brain’s processing capacity is large, but limited. It already processes over six thousand thoughts a day.

So when we encounter new information, our brains have to make a choice about how to allocate the remaining cognitive resources. And because our brains are programmed to prioritize emotions with high “affective value”—like fear, resentment, or anger—these strong emotions will generally win out, leaving us with even fewer mental resources to devote to making progress on the things that matter.

When your computer is running slowly, all you have to do is hit a few buttons to clear all the browsing data, and immediately the machine works smoother and faster. In a similar way, you can learn simple tactics to rid yourself of all the clutter slowing down the hard drive of your mind.

The Effortless State is one in which you are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in that moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.

What if the biggest thing keeping us from doing what matters is the false assumption that it has to take tremendous effort? What if, instead, we considered the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it?

Our brain is wired to resist what it perceives as hard and welcome what it perceives as easy. This bias is sometimes called the cognitive ease principle, or the principle of least effort. It’s our tendency to take the path of least resistance to achieve what we want.

Here is what I learned: trying too hard makes it harder to get the results you want. Here is what I realized: behind almost every failure of my whole life I had made the same error. When I’d failed, it was rarely because I hadn’t tried hard enough, it was because I’d been trying too hard.

Carl Jacobi, the nineteenth-century German mathematician, developed a reputation as someone who could solve especially hard and intractable problems. He learned that to do that most easily, Man muss immer umkehren, which translates to “One must invert, always invert.”

To invert means to turn an assumption or approach upside down, to work backward, to ask, “What if the opposite were true?” Inversion can help you discover obvious insights you have missed because you’re looking at the problem from only one point of view. It can highlight errors in our thinking. It can open our minds to new ways of doing things.

Effortless Inversion means looking at problems from the opposite perspective. It means asking, “What if this could be easy?” It means learning to solve problems from a state of focus, clarity, and calm. It means getting good at getting things done by putting in less effort.

Southwest decided to issue “tickets” that could be printed out on ordinary paper and obtained from no-frills automatic dispensers. Merely questioning the necessity of the complex features and functions of an expensive ticketing system revealed a far simpler, cheaper, and easy-to-execute solution. Free of the assumptions that make your problem look hard, you would be surprised how often an easier solution appears.

Seth Godin once shared the following: “If you can think about how hard it is to push a business uphill, particularly when you’re just getting started, one answer is to say: ‘Why don’t you just start a different business you can push downhill?’

Take, for example, Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in history, who has described the investment strategy at Berkshire Hathaway as “lethargy bordering on sloth.” They are not looking to invest in companies that will require enormous effort to achieve profitability. They are looking for investments that are easy to say yes to: no-brainer businesses that are simple to run and have long-term competitive advantages.

In Buffett’s words, “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

When a strategy is so complex that each step feels akin to pushing a boulder up a hill, you should pause. Invert the problem. Ask, “What’s the simplest way to achieve this result?”

So often we separate important work from trivial play. People say, “I work hard and then I can play hard.” For many people there are essential things and then there are enjoyable things.

But essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail backbreaking effort. Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead?

Don’t underestimate the power of the right soundtrack to ditch the drudgery and get into a groove.

Ole Kirk Christiansen, who had the idea to turn his struggling carpentry business into a toy company while tinkering in his empty warehouse. He called his company LEGO, from the danish term leg godt, which means “play well.”

Rituals are similar to habits in the sense that “when I do X, I also do Y.” But they are different from habits because of one key component: the psychological satisfaction you experience when you do them. Habits explain “what” you do, but rituals are about “how” you do it. Rituals make essential habits easier to sustain by infusing the habits with meaning.

“The act of folding is far more than making clothes compact for storage. It is an act of caring, an expression of love and appreciation for the way these clothes support your lifestyle. Therefore, when we fold, we should put our heart into it, thanking our clothes for protecting our bodies.”

Our rituals are habits we have put our thumbprint on. Our rituals are habits with a soul. They have the power to transform a tedious task into an experience that creates joy.

When we attach small fragments of wonder to mundane tasks, we are no longer waiting for the time when we can finally allow ourselves to relax. That time is always now. As fun and laughs lighten more of our moments, we are drawn back further toward our natural, playful Effortless State.

Do you have any items like this, living rent-free in your mind? Outdated goals, suggestions, or ideas that snuck into your brain long ago and took up permanent residence? Mindsets that have outlived their usefulness but have been part of you for so long, you barely even notice them?

Have you ever found that the more you complain—and the more you read and hear other people complain—the easier it is to find things to complain about? On the other hand, have you ever found that the more grateful you are, the more you have to be grateful for?

Complaining is the quintessential example of something that is “easy but trivial.” In fact, it’s one of the easiest things for us to do. But toxic thoughts like these, however trivial, quickly accumulate. And the more mental space they occupy, the harder it becomes to return to the Effortless State.

When you focus on something you are thankful for, the effect is instant. It immediately shifts you from a lack state (regrets, worries about the future, the feeling of being behind) and puts you into a have state (what is going right, what progress you are making, what potential exists in this moment). It reminds you of all the resources, all the assets, all the skills you have at your disposal—so you can use them to more easily do what matters most.

Gratitude is a powerful, catalytic thing. It starves negative emotions of the oxygen they need to survive. It also generates a positive, self-sustaining system wherever and whenever it is applied.

The broaden-and-build theory in psychology offers an explanation for why this is the case. Positive emotions open us to new perspectives and possibilities. Our openness encourages creative ideas and fosters social bonds. These things change us. They unlock new physical, intellectual, psychological, and social resources. They create “an upward spiral” that improves our odds of coping with the next challenge we face.

The flywheel flies forward with almost unstoppable momentum.” Put simply, a system is self-sustaining if it requires less and less investment of energy over time. Once it’s set in motion, maintaining it becomes easier, then easy, then eventually effortless.

I resolved to attach gratitude to each and every complaint. When I caught myself saying, “Getting through airport security was a hassle today,” I would add, “I am thankful to be safely on the plane.” After grumbling, “My son didn’t get to his math homework yet,” I would say, “I am thankful he is so interested in the new book he is reading.” After bemoaning the fact that “I was expecting to have lost more weight this week,” I would add, “I am thankful I am watching my weight and my health.”

Have you ever held on to a grudge against people who hurt you? Wasted precious mental energy being angry, hurt, annoyed, or resentful? How long has the wound been festering? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades?

According to the late Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who had been named the world’s top management thinker, people don’t really buy products or services. Rather, they “hire” them to do a job.

In a similar way, we often hire a grudge to fulfill an emotional need that is not currently being met. But as we conduct a performance review, we discover grudges perform poorly. Grudges cost us resources but don’t deliver a satisfying return on our investment. So we must relieve a grudge of its duties.